There have been some good posts at Gene Expression Classic you might want to check out. In particular:

Synaesthesia and savantism and Where do morals come from?. The second is a review of Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality by Kevin Mitchell

Natural selection and the collapse of economic growth and Natural selection and economic growth by Jason Collins.

Earliest Art in the Americas: Ice Age Image of Mammoth or Mastodon Found in Florida. Claims that the a rendering of a elephant-like creature in Florida is at least ~13,000 years old because “this is the date for the last appearance of these animals in eastern North America.” If this is based on fossils probably you can fudge that a little lower, since first and last fossils tend to be a subset of the real interval of time.

The Michael Hecht-Rationally Speaking affair. Jennifer Michael Hecht is making accusations of plagiarism against Massimo Pigliucci and Julia Galef. One can’t render final judgment on this sort of thinking without digging deeper, but my personal experience is that most perceptions of plagiarism and copying have to do with the fact that the web ...

1) Post from the past: The wisdom of Seinfeld. How far in the past? When I wrote this it was closer to the series finale of Seinfeld than to now!

2) Weird search query of the week: “economics of having children marketplace.” I think I might have mentioned some of Murray Rothbard’s strange ideas on this at some point….

3) Comment of the week, in response to “Cave of Forgotten Dreams, see it, but tune the narration out”:

Razib,
You are not the first person to misspell his first name “Werner” in that manner, many do it with purpose to undercut the man and discredit his films (though I assume you would argue a minor overlook and/or simple mistake). His films continue to command viewing decades after their making and his legend grows with that.

Is it a perfect film? -No.
Is it an essential film? – Absolutely.
Was the scientific element that you vented about present? -Yes
If there was more scientific informations would we have missed out on the humanity of it? -Yes

“Humaness” as it was put in the film has much a place in the culture of man as ...

What’s the News: In the animal kingdom, prey species must follow one rule above all others: keep away from predators. To do this, some animals take chemical cues from the urine they stumble upon. Now, new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science has identified a single molecule in the urine of many mammalian carnivores that causes rodents to scurry in fear. This chemical could eventually help scientists understand instinctual behavior in animals.

How the Heck:

A research team at the Harvard Medical School analyzed a group of olfactory receptors called trace amine-associated receptors (TAARs). They concentrated on one in particular, TAAR4, which is strongly activated by bobcat urine (sometimes used by gardeners to repel small pests). They found that one specific molecule, called 2-phenylethylamine, is responsible for the TAAR4 reaction.
To see if 2-phenylethylamine is bobcat specific, the team tested urine samples from 38 mammalian species, ...

Over the past week there have been three posts which I’ve put up which are related. Two of them have a straightforward relation, Britons, English, Germans, and collective action and Britons, English, and Dutch. But the third might not seem related to the other two, We stand on the shoulders of cultural giants, but it is. When we talk about things such as the spread of language through “elite emulation” or “population replacement” they’re rather vague catchall terms. We don’t decompose them mechanistically into their components to explore whether they can explain what they purport to explain. Rather, we take these phenomena for granted in a very simplistic black box fashion. We know what they’re describing on the face of it. “We” here means people without a background in sociolinguistics, obviously.

To give an example of the pitfall of this method, in much of Rodney Stark’s work on sociology of religion (the production before his recent quasi-apologetic material) his thinking was crisp and logical, but the psychological models were intuitive and naive and tended to get little input from the latest findings in cognitive science. In One True God he actually offers an explanation for why ...

“The goal of the present study was to analyze the epidemiology and specific risk factors of traumatic brain injury (TBI) in the Asterix illustrated comic books. Among the illustrated literature, TBI is a predominating injury pattern. A retrospective analysis of TBI in all 34 Asterix comic books was performed by examining the initial neurological status and signs of TBI. Clinical data were correlated to information regarding the trauma mechanism, the sociocultural background of victims and offenders, and the circumstances of the traumata, to identify specific risk factors. RESULTS: Seven hundred and four TBIs were identified. The majority of persons involved were adult and male. The major cause of trauma was assault (98.8%). Traumata were classified to be severe in over 50% (GCS 3-8). Different neurological deficits and signs of basal skull fractures were identified. Although over half of head-injury victims had a severe initial impairment of consciousness, no case of death or permanent neurological deficit was found. The largest group of head-injured characters was constituted by Romans (63.9%), while Gauls caused nearly 90% of the TBIs. A helmet had been worn by 70.5% of victims but had been lost ...

This is a guest post by Jamie L. Vernon, Ph.D., a research scientist and aspiring policy wonk, who recently moved to D.C. to get a taste of the action

I remember the “Smokey” the bear commercials very well. They usually appeared during my Saturday morning cartoons, back when kids actually sat and watched cartoons each morning while slurping a bowl of Honeycombs. The commercials often involved some terrible scenario in which an absent-minded person committed a stupid act that destroyed an entire forest. In the end, “Smokey” would appear, sometimes with a tear in his eye, to say, “Only you can prevent forest fires.” The message was clear and powerful. Even as a child, I felt responsible for protecting the forests. I dared not leave a hot fire pit after a night of camping. It was an effective campaign the likes of which we could use today.

I believe a recent report from the National Research Council makes a compelling case for the need to create a modern day “Smokey” the bear campaign. Only this time, Smokey will encourage us to reduce our carbon footprint.

The report makes recommendations for the best “Policy Options to Reduce Petroleum Use and GHG Emissions in the U.S. Transportation Sector.” Much of the report covers the issues with which we are all very familiar, improving fuel economy standards, increasing investments in public transportation and infrastructure and even increased fuel taxes.

One section of the report that jumped out at me was entitled “Measures to Curb Private Vehicle Travel.” According to the report, there are more than 225 million private automobiles in the U.S. that account for about 40% of all CO2 emitted from transportation.

The authors state:

“…any serious effort to reduce energy use and emission from transportation must cut the amount of energy used and GHGs emitted from private vehicles, especially those in metropolitan areas.”

The focus on metropolitan areas is important because three-quarters of private vehicles are located in cities and their surrounding areas. Also, more than half of the U.S. population lives in suburbs. These areas tend to be less dense and feature more separation of land uses. This leads to more parking and road capacity and higher levels of motor vehicle ownership and use. Therefore, these parts of the country offer the greatest opportunity for reducing automobile travel by investing in alternative modes of transportation such as walking, biking and public transit.

The report makes three policy recommendations designed to reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT):

1) create more compact patterns of land development

2) expand the array of transportation options available to residents of these areas

3) increase the price of road use and parking

Sure, these policies will have some impact. But, the problem with each of these recommendations is that they are passive ways of motivating behavior changes. A more effective way to change behavior may be to convince the residents that it’s in their interest to do so. This is why I believe a campaign that focuses on the people will enhance the impact of the policies.

In addition to implementing the recommended policies, a “Smokey”-like campaign will remove some of the sting. If people understand and appreciate the reasons why these policies are being implemented, they will be more likely to accept them and perhaps even contribute to their implementation. I realize that adults who are jaded by the current political climate will be difficult to reach, but we can instill in the next generation the need for a change.

I can tell you from experience that the younger generation is aware of climate change. Despite the beliefs of their parents, they are receiving the message that global warming is a threat. Like my generation feared the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, I believe this generation recognizes there is a problem and they can effect the change that we need. A campaign that encourages them to do their part could go far toward this goal.

So who’s going to make it happen?

Follow Jamie Vernon on Twitter or read his occasional posts at his personal blog, “American SciCo.”

I’ve had a turbulent couple of days, so watching this time lapse of laminar flow of clouds over the Swiss Alps was just what I needed:

Very pretty! There’s some astronomy in there as well; in several of the clips as the Milky Way passes by you can also spot the Andromeda galaxy; Orion can be seen in others as well. I think my favorite part was seeing airplane contrails pop into existence and then stream away with the clouds. The video is by Patryk Kizny, who also did the time lapse video of the star party in Poland.

And yeah, there’s turbulent flow there as well. But from a distance, that’s pretty too.

Tip o’ the mug o’ cocoa to Patryk Kizny.

Related posts:

- Time lapse video: from North Carolina to the galactic center
- Gorgeous Milky Way Time Lapse
- Very Large Telescope, Very Stunning Time Lapse Video
- Incredibly, impossibly beautiful time lapse video
- Dust, from the desert below to the galaxy above
- Stunning winter sky timelapse video: Sub Zero
- OK, because I like y’all: bonus aurora timelapse ...

People with type 2 diabetes don’t respond properly to insulin, a hormone that controls the levels of sugar in their blood. Many of them have to take tablets to keep their sugar levels down, while others rely on insulin injections. But in a Swiss laboratory, there are diabetic mice with a more convenient solution. If they need more insulin, all they need is to bathe under a blue light.

The mice are the work of Haifeng Ye from ETH Zurich, who has developed a way of turning on individual genes with bursts of light. Blue light in particular sets of a chemical chain reaction in the rodents’ bodies that eventually switches on a gene called GLP-1. It tells the pancreas to make more insulin, makes our cells more sensitive to this hormone, and makes us feel full.

Ye’s work is a fusion of two of the most exciting methods in biology: optogenetics, the ability to control events in a cell using bursts of light; and synthetic biology, the building of new biological circuits that don’t exist in nature. In a related editorial, Brian Chow and Ed Boyden (one of the ...

Everybody is talking, and rightly so, about the big Al Gore piece in Rolling Stone on science, reason, and the climate crisis. And it is, indeed, quite a tour de force. Gore is not only a charismatic leader (now that he’s not running for president), he’s a great writer.

Nevertheless, I’m afraid to say that Gore is operating, big time, in liberal Enlightenment mode–precisely what I critiqued in The American Prospect. Let’s give some examples of Gore’s Enlightenment rhetoric:

Admittedly, the contest over global warming is a challenge for the referee because it’s a tag-team match, a real free-for-all. In one corner of the ring are Science and Reason. In the other corner: Poisonous Polluters and Right-wing Ideologues.

And:

We haven’t gone nuts — but the “conversation of democracy” has become so deeply dysfunctional that our ability to make intelligent collective decisions has been seriously impaired. Throughout American history, we relied on the vibrancy of our public square — and the quality of our democratic discourse — to make better decisions than most nations in the history of the world. But we are now routinely making really bad decisions that completely ignore the best available evidence of what is true and what is false. When the distinction between truth and falsehood is systematically attacked without shame or consequence — when a great nation makes crucially important decisions on the basis of completely false information that is no longer adequately filtered through the fact-checking function of a healthy and honest public discussion — the public interest is severely damaged.

I agree with one part of Gore’s message whole heartedly. We really have lost our grip on reality and this really is endangering our politics and our civilization. Without facts, we’re screwed. We’re dysfunctional.

But I don’t agree with Gore’s account of why this happened. He blames the “powerful.” He blames the “Polluters.” He blames the media. But most of all, for him it’s special interests–money in politics, money in the fossil fuel industry, is blocking our progress and sowing misinformation.

Gore seems to assume that if these pernicious effects were vanquished–or controlled by better policy–then the “public interest” would triumph again and we would all rally around it–just as we would all embrace the same facts again. But that just isn’t true.

The truth is that we are psychologically programmed not to accept the facts; and moreover, we don’t all want the same things–liberals and conservatives, in particular, have different value systems and psychological needs. And liberals, in particular, need to think that society can be rational, and that science can fix our problems–and that if it isn’t working out that way, it must be due to some kind of wrongdoing or nefariousness.

But alas, while our state of dysfunction is very real, the cause is not some evil Machiavellian group of special interests (an argument that works less and less well, by the way, as more and more fossil fuel companies become supporters of climate action). No: the cause lies within ourselves, and our brains.

What’s the News: We walking, talking agglomerations of cells have always thought of multicellular life as a profound jump in evolution. The first organisms were just single cells, but at some point, they began to work together for the good of the whole, divvying up tasks like nutrient transport and cellular messaging. Eventually, these colonies became the complex multicellular life that we know and love.

But maybe being multicellular isn’t as difficult to achieve as we thought. Scientists presenting at the Society for the Study of Evolution conference have, over just a couple months, gotten single-celled yeast to grow into colonies that function as multicellular organisms.

How the Heck:

First, to get populations of yeast that would be naturally inclined to stick together, the biologists made it hard for lone cells to survive. They suspended cells in tubes of liquid and then spun them in centrifuges, which caused clumped cells to sink to the bottom, while lighter, singleton cells stayed afloat. While floating cells were discarded, the sticky cells ...

Don’t worry, this is for science.

It’s not easy being a parent. There are the constant feedings, the sleepless nights—and of course, the time-consuming task of shimmying into that unwieldy animal suit.

When the offspring of endangered species are orphaned or abandoned, scientists and vets fill the pawprints of the missing parents. But animals raised by humans can develop all sorts of issues; they’re not prepared to fend for themselves in the wild, they don’t play well with others, and they have an unhealthy interest in humans, cozying up to hikers and hunters.

So while humans are busily looking for Mommy’s nose in Junior’s face, these scientists take things in the opposite direction. Here’s how they make themselves over to look, act, and even smell like the animals they raise:

Scientists at the Hetaoping Research and Conservation Center for the Giant Panda, part of China’s Wolong Nature Reserve, donned full-body plush panda suits to raise a four-month-old cub. The result is both adorable and more than a little absurd: Look, it’s a panda! Walking on two legs. And weilding a measuring tape. Uh, what happened to its head?
At the Wildlife Education and Rehabilitation Center in California, vets ...

A few months ago I posted about the Autism Science Foundation: an organization that funds real research into autism. We don’t know what causes autism, but ongoing research is making progress, and ASF is helping support that.

For today only, they are featured on the Philanthroper home page. Philanthroper is a group that helps raise money one dollar at a time. I like this idea. Giving a dollar isn’t all that hard for a lot of people, and the process is pretty painless: if you have a buck and a Paypal account, it takes less than a minute.

A lot of time, money, and effort is being wasted looking into a connection between vaccines and autism when we know no such connection exists. I’m glad there are groups out there trying to find the real causes, and that’s why I already donated to ASF.

So. Got a minute and a buck?

It’s quite the question these days, for all of us. And it’s the subject of a panel I have organized for the World Conference of Science Journalists in Doha, which begins in just a few days now:

Am I a Science Journalist?

In the evolving world of science communication, how do we define a science journalist? This panel will discuss whether the venerable word “journalist” can or should be applied to some, all, or none of the new generation of science bloggers and educators who are remaking the field.

Producer/moderator

Chris Mooney, Discover; Point of Inquiry (USA)

Panelists

Ed Yong, Not Exactly Rocket Science (UK)
Moheb Costandi, Neurophilosophy (UK)
Homayoun Kheyri, freelance; BBC World Service (Australia/Iran)
Cristine Russell, Council for the Advancement of Science Writing; Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (USA)

The panelists have to figure out the “answer” to the question more than I do, but it is certainly a conundrum, when almost nobody has a staff job at a publication any longer. Do all science bloggers count as science journalists? The thought gives me pause–I don’t think all of them practice the norms of journalism, though some clearly do.

I know and practice the norms, meanwhile, but many things that I do professionally–like science communication work and training–clearly aren’t journalism. Everybody is piecing it together in different ways. Maybe the problem is that the concept of “journalism” partly bears the stamp of an era that’s behind us.

For one of the brightest stars in the sky, Betelgeuse still has some surprises up its sleeve. We’ve known for a couple of years it’s surrounded by a cloud of gas, but new observations show that nebula is far larger than previously thought!

[Click to enorionate.]

This new image is care of the Very Large Telescope, and shows a very deep and very high-resolution shot of Betelgeuse in the infrared. The inner black circle is the 2009 shot of the star and its surrounding gas — what we knew about before — and the big image shows all the gas around it just discovered. At the very center is a red circle indicating the actual size of Betelgeuse on this scale — it’s a red supergiant, and nearly two billion kilometers in diameter.

This structure is actually a wind of material blown off of the star itself. The exact mechanism behind this is unclear, though. Red supergiants are so big that gravity on their "surface" (they don’t really have a surface; they just kinda fade away into space) is very weak, and they can barely hold on to ...

Changes in Diet and Lifestyle and Long-Term Weight Gain in Women and Men:

Within each 4-year period, participants gained an average of 3.35 lb (5th to 95th percentile, ?4.1 to 12.4). On the basis of increased daily servings of individual dietary components, 4-year weight change was most strongly associated with the intake of potato chips (1.69 lb), potatoes (1.28 lb), sugar-sweetened beverages (1.00 lb), unprocessed red meats (0.95 lb), and processed meats (0.93 lb) and was inversely associated with the intake of vegetables (?0.22 lb), whole grains (?0.37 lb), fruits (?0.49 lb), nuts (?0.57 lb), and yogurt (?0.82 lb) (P?0.005 for each comparison). Aggregate dietary changes were associated with substantial differences in weight change (3.93 lb across quintiles of dietary change). Other lifestyle factors were also independently associated with weight change (P<0.001), including physical activity (?1.76 lb across quintiles); alcohol use (0.41 lb per drink per day), smoking (new quitters, 5.17 lb; former smokers, 0.14 lb), sleep (more weight gain with <6 or >8 hours of sleep), and television watching (0.31 lb per hour per day).

I took the results when they controlled for other variables and filtered them all so that their p-values were 0.001 or less (in fact, of ...

“Karaoke singing is a very popular entertainment among young people in Asia. It is a leisure singing activity with the singer’s voice amplified with special acoustic effects in the backdrop of music. Music video and song captions are shown on television screen to remind the singers during singing. It is not uncommon to find participants singing continuously for four to five hours each time. As most of the karaoke singers have no formal training in singing, these amateur singers are more vulnerable to developing voice problems under these intensive singing activities. This study reports the performance of 20 young amateur singers (10 males and 10 females, aged between 20-25 years) on a series of phonatory function tasks carried out during continuous karaoke singing. Half of the singers were given water to drink and short duration of vocal rests at regular intervals during singing and the other half sang continuously without taking any water or rest. The subjects who were given hydration and vocal rests sang significantly longer than those who did not take any water or rest. The voice quality, as measured by perceptual and acoustic measures, and vocal function, ...

xkcd raises an interesting issue or three. Click to see the exciting conclusion, starring Joe Biden.

Naturally, in less time than it takes to eat a sandwich there was a Tumblr account dedicated to Joe Biden eating.

But one can’t help but ask — is it true? Does it really not matter what it is we choose to lavish our attentions upon? Would we find as much depth and complexity in different cans of Diet Dr. Pepper as oenophiles would claim are lurking in a bottle of fine Bordeaux?

I think we have to say no. Some things really are more complex and nuanced than other things. I could provide examples, but they aren’t any better than ones you can imagine yourself.

That’s okay, it doesn’t make the comic any less funny. And there is a clever point that remains true: people pick and choose the things on which they lavish their attention. To one person, all jazz is just noise; another would say the same about classical, and another about punk. The real issue isn’t the existence of complexity, it’s how we choose to recognize and value it. If we went through life taking note of every fact around us, we’d go insane within minutes. Making sense of existence relies heavily on coarse-graining.

But there’s yet another issue! (Yes I know I’m spending too much time analyzing a single comic — or am I deviously making a point?) The cartoon didn’t choose Diet Dr. Pepper as its example, it chose pictures of Joe Biden eating sandwiches. And you know, there really is a lot of depth there. There’s a lot you could say about a large collection of such photographs. So the question is — are any of those things worth saying? Complexity might be necessary for great art, but it doesn’t seem to be sufficient. Paying attention to certain kinds of details seems rewarding in a way that paying attention to others is not.

Anyone have a simple demarcation between the two? When is complexity deserving of study, and when does it merit being ignored? I’m sure aestheticians have argued about this for centuries, and I’m not trying to break any new ground here. I’m just at a loss for a good theory, which isn’t a condition I like to be in.

Just as a so’s-you-know: the radio/podcast interview I did with Jules Sherred for Geeky Pleasures is now online for your listening nerdtainment. We talked about a ton of stuff, including the space program, Doctor Who, space colonies, Trek, asteroids, antivaxxers, and nudity.

Oh, did that get your attention? I figured it would. People love it when I talk about Doctor Who.

What’s the News: Parrots are even less bird-brained than previously thought, suggests a new study in the journal Biology Letters. In a series of tests, researchers have learned that some African grey parrots can use logical reasoning to uncover hidden food.

How the Heck:

Sandra Mikolasch and her colleagues at the University of Vienna in Austria trained seven African grey parrots to find treats stashed under cups. While the birds watched, Mikolasch placed food under one cup and left an adjacent cup empty—the parrots had to choose the correct cup to get their snacks.
After training the birds, Mikolasch hid a seed and a walnut under two separate cups in front of the on-looking parrots. In plain view, she removed one of the treats and allowed the birds to choose cups again. Three of the parrots were able to correctly pick the cup with food at least 70 percent of the time. If the birds were purely guessing, ...

What’s the News: Lytro, a Silicon Valley start-up, has designed a camera that lets you shoot first and focus later. The camera captures the far more light and data than traditional models, and comes with software that lets you focus the photo, shift perspective, or go 3D after you’ve taken the photo. The company plans to sell a consumer, fits-in-your-pocket model by the end of the year.

How the Heck:

Lytro’s camera captures the light field, all the light traveling every direction through every point in a scene. Light-field cameras records data—such as direction, color, and intensity—about each individual ray of light. (Typical digital cameras, on the other hand, also take in information on color, instensity, and—to some extent—direction, but they essentially sum up light in a scene and record the total rather than tallying the information for each ray of light.) To do this, the camera has an array of microlenses behind the main lens, which help break up the light coming in into its component rays.
As Lytro CEO Ren Ng told the Wall Street Journal, it’s akin to recording each musician in a band on a different track and mixing the tracks later, rather than recording ...